Just Practicing

Nous sommes le
23 Brumaire, An 215

Just Practicing

for Alan Ansen

“most delicate hippopotamus of poets”
--Allen Ginsberg


In his old age home in Athens (Z writes),
“Alan reads Agatha Christie and the Trib
but can barely hold a pencil, far less write.”

“He says he wants to die
but insists on his flu shot, his glass of red
wine, and ice cream!! When I found him
napping at 10.00 am yesterday, he
told me that he was ‘just practicing.’”

Kerouac dubbed you “Rollo Greb”;
Burroughs, “AJ”; Corso, “Dad Deform”
--names I’d call dumb, didn’t you?
In Aegina you lectured on
“The Poetry of Auden, Ansen,
Eliot, Pound, and Yeats”:
we argued, pro and con.

I had an old house once, nearby,
--you could see the Parthenon,
and a pomegranate tree, amid
whose roots I found a brass pestle,
hidden by some long numbed kid.

They tore it down, the house.
An apartment building stands there now.


Envoi: Alan died yesterday, November 12, 2006 at 5:30 a.m. He had been moved to a clinic a week ago, after having suffered a stroke. He never came out of his coma. He will be buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Athens today.

--Peter Dreyer


Note: yerokomeio = old age home; polykatoikeia = apartment building.